Cintpos

The Tripos Portable Operating system was developed in Cambridge by a
group of research students and myself starting in 1977. It was a
light weight multi-tasking operating system that designed to be
portable. It was implemented in BCPL and assembly language, and ran
on several different machines. It has not been used in Cambridge
for several years. However, much of the source code is still preserved
and I have constructed a demonstration version of Tripos (called Cintpos)
based on
Cintcode BCPL.

The current distribution of Cintpos is a major revision of the origin
version I made available some years ago. Cintpos devices are
implemented using Pthreads and the library facilities include random
access files and input/output via TCP/IP connections. The use of
Pthreads is proving to be too system dependent and I am seriously
considering replacing it by a scheme using just one thread, leaving
interpreter to poll devices as needed. Initial experiments indicate
that this new scheme is more machine independent and has better
performance.

The BCPL Cintcode and Cintpos manuals are now combined and available
by clicking on:
bcplman.pdf.

Free Distribution

This is not yet available but when it is it will be available
free of charge for private and academic purposes. If you would like to
install it on your machine, have a look at the distribution
README,
file and obtain a copy of
cintpos.tgz
or
cintpos.zip.
The sizes and dates of creation of these files can be found in
FILES.

WARNING

This distribution is not yet finished and may never be, but may be
of interest in its present state.